Yesterday, I made a leap. I pre-ordered the iPhone 4. A big change for me because it means giving up my stable relationship with Verizon Wireless that I have had for many years. I’ve not been a big fan of the Blackberry. I’ve owned an iPod Touch for about a year and my only two complaints were lack of a camera and lack of 3G connection. So I’m really not concerned about AT&T dropped calls. I’ll be using it more for the data access. That said, I had some serious struggles on the Apple.com site when ordering, as I expected. I think they did the best they could with a volume of 600,000 orders in one day. I know it took me several attempts so I can only imagine the number of visitors to the Apple site. AT&T reported 13 million visits where current users could check for upgrade eligibility. Amazing numbers.
That prompted me to look at Preorders.com. I was thinking what a great name for a site that could be used to pre-order popular electronics or even other items such as concert tickets. There is a site at Preorders.com, but it is disappointing. It appears to be online store, but the items listed are not in the pre-order category. Further disappointing, clicking on any of the links leads to a 404 error page. I’m hoping that the owners are working on something and the current site isn’t their final attempt.
Preorder.com (singular) is also owned, but shows the hosting default page at the moment. It pains me to see good names under utilized. Perhaps there will be great things to come from these domains. I’ll keep an eye on them and let you know.